Another Part of the Forest
Erik Haagensen
June 7, 2010: Lillian Hellman should have listened to Mary Poppins. "I never explain anything," proclaimed P.L. Travers' famous nanny. Nevertheless, in 1946 Hellman decided to write a prequel to her 1939 Broadway hit, "The Little Foxes," which introduced the rapacious Hubbard clan. "Another Part of the Forest" was intended to explain how this greedy, grasping Southern family got that way. The show was a middling hit (182 performances, versus 410 for "Foxes"), enough to generate a 1948 film version, but received decidedly mixed notices. Brooks Atkinson complained in The New York Times that "Forest" "went over the line, into old-fashioned melodrama." Alas, he was right. Though Peccadillo Theater Company gives it a game go, director Dan Wackerman and his largely solid if unspectacular cast can't compensate for Hellmann's schematically plotted, two-dimensional script.
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